Archives for September 2016

As the General Election approaches, Republican Congresswoman Martha McSally has released two new ads in the race for Arizona’s Second Congressional District.

In her ad, “John Ladd,” longtime southern Arizona rancher, John Ladd, gives his personal testimony why voters should support Col Martha McSally. “[she’s] trying to get the border secured. She brought the first and biggest delegation from Homeland Security down here last year. Nobody ever did that before… She is leading the charge in Washington right now.”

Here’s the video for the ad:

In her second ad, “Helen,” World War II veteran Helen Anderson tells her story of service in the Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVEs), where she serviced combat planes. Ms. Anderson says she joined the Navy for patriotism. Anderson notes that she is “extremely proud that Martha McSally can represent women veterans and veterans as a whole. It’s not just lip service, it’s actual service. She puts her whole heart and soul into it and that’s the reason I support Martha McSally.”

You can view “Helen” here:

Martha McSally will face off against liberal Democrat Dr. Matt Heinz in the General Election.

This November, several states will vote on whether to legalize marijuana for recreational use, and the proponents of legalization have seized on a seemingly clever argument: marijuana is safer than alcohol. The Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol, an effort of the Marijuana Policy Project (or MPP), has taken this argument across the country. Their latest strategy is labeled Marijuana vs. Alcohol. It is a very misleading, even dangerous, message, based on bad social science and sophistic public deception.

Citing out-of-date studies that go back ten years and more, even using that well-known scientific journal, Wikipedia, the MPP never references current research on the harms of today’s high potency and edible marijuana, studies that come out monthly if not more frequently. Indeed, their Marijuana vs. Alcohol page concludes with a 1988 statement about the negligible harms of marijuana—but that is a marijuana that simply does not exist anymore, neither in mode nor potency. Today’s marijuana is at least five times more potent, and sold in much different form. And the science of marijuana and its effects on the brain have come some distance since 1988 as well.

So out-of-date is the science and knowledge of marijuana from thirty years ago, it would be malpractice in any other field to suggest that kind of information about a drug having any contemporary relevance at all. One almost wonders if the MPP thinks public health professors still instruct their students on how to use microfiche to perform their research as they prepare to write their papers on 5K memory typewriters.

It is simply misleading in a public health campaign to cite dated research while at the same time ignore a larger body of current evidence that points in the opposite direction of a desired outcome. At great potential peril to our public health, political science (in the hands of the marijuana industry) is far outrunning medical science. But the danger is clear: with the further promotion, marketing, and use of an increasingly known dangerous substance, public health and safety will pay the price.

Consider three basic problems with the industry’s latest campaign:

I. Comparisons of relative dangers of various drugs are simply impossible and can often lead to paradoxical conclusions. It is impossible to compare a glass of chardonnay and its effects on various adults of various weights and tolerance levels with the inhalation or consumption of a high-potency marijuana joint or edible. Is the joint from the 5 percent THC level or the 25 percent level? How about a 30 mg—or stronger—gummy bear? A glass of wine with dinner processes through the body in about an hour and has little remaining effect. A marijuana brownie or candy can take up to 90 minutes to even begin to take effect.

Consider a consumer of a glass of wine who ate a full meal and waited an hour or more before driving and a consumer of a marijuana edible taking the wheel of a plane, train, automobile, or anything else. The wine drinker would likely be sober, the marijuana consumer would just be getting high, and, given the dose, possibly very high at that.

Beyond acute effects, the chronic impact of marijuana is also damaging. Approximately twice the percentage of regular marijuana users will experience Marijuana Use Disorder than will alcohol users experience Alcohol Use Disorder—both disorders categorized by the Diagnostic Statistics Manual (DSM).[1] Marijuana is also the number one substance of abuse for teens admitted to treatment, far higher than the percentage who present with alcohol problems. In fact, the most recent data out of Colorado shows 20 percent of teens admitted for treatment have marijuana listed as their primary substance of abuse compared to less than one percent for alcohol.

Beyond unscientific dose and effect comparisons, there is a growing list of problems where marijuana use does, indeed, appear to be more harmful than alcohol. According to Carnegie Mellon’s Jonathan Caulkins: “Marijuana is significantly more likely to interfere with life functioning” than alcohol and “it is moderately more likely to create challenges of self-control and to be associated with social and mental health problems.”

Additionally, a recent study out of UC Davis revealed that marijuana dependence was more strongly linked to financial difficulties than alcohol dependence and had the same impacts on downward mobility, antisocial behavior in the workplace, and relationship conflict as alcohol.

II. The marijuana industry pushes and promotes the use of a smoked or vaped substance, but never compares marijuana to tobacco. Indeed, the two substances have much more in common than marijuana and alcohol, especially with regard to the products themselves and the method of consumption (though we are also seeing increasing sales of child-attractive marijuana candies). But why is the comparison never made? The answer lies in the clear impossibility.

Consider: Almost every claim about marijuana’s harms in relation to alcohol has to do with the deaths associated with alcohol. But, hundreds of thousands more people die from tobacco than alcohol. Based on their measures of mortality, which is safer: alcohol or tobacco? Can one safely drink and drive? No. Can one smoke as many cigarettes as one wants while driving? Of course. So, what’s the more dangerous substance? Mortality does not answer that question.

Alcohol consumption can create acute problems, while tobacco consumption can create chronic problems. And those chronic problems particularly affect organs like the lungs, throat, and heart. But what of the chronic impact on the brain? That’s the marijuana risk, and, seemingly, society is being told that brains are less important than lungs. Nobody can seriously believe that, which is why these comparisons simply fail scrutiny.

This illustrates but one of the problems in comparing dangerous substances. As Professor Caulkins recently wrote:

“The real trouble is not that marijuana is more or less dangerous than alcohol; the problem is that they are altogether different…. The country is not considering whether to switch the legal statuses of alcohol and marijuana. Unfortunately, our society does not get to choose either to have alcohol’s dangers or to have marijuana’s dangers. Rather, it gets to have alcohol’s dangers…and also marijuana’s dangers.

Further, marijuana problems are associated with alcohol problems. New research out of Columbia University reveals that marijuana users are five times more likely to have an alcohol abuse disorder. Society doesn’t just switch alcohol for marijuana—too often, one ends up with use of both, compounding both problems.

The larger point for voters to understand: The marijuana legalization movement is not trying to ban or end alcohol sales or consumption; rather, it wants to add marijuana to the dangerous substances already available, including alcohol. This is not about marijuana or alcohol, after all. It’s about marijuana and alcohol.

We can see this effect in states like Colorado, with headlines such as “Alcohol sales get higher after weed legalization.” And, according to the most recent federal data[2], alcohol use by teens, as well as adults, has increased in Colorado since 2012 (the year of legalization). If alcohol is the problem for the MPP, in their model state–Colorado–alcohol consumption has increased with marijuana legalization. Legalizing marijuana will, in the end, only make alcohol problems worse.

III. The legalization movement regularly cites to one study in the Journal of Scientific Reports to “prove” that marijuana is safer than alcohol. But this study leads to odd conclusions in what the authors, themselves, call a “novel risk assessment methodology.” For instance, the researchers find that every drug, from cocaine to meth to MDMA to LSD, is found to be safer than alcohol. (See this graph). By the MPP standard, we should thereby make these substances legal as well. But, seeing such data in its full light, we all know this would be nonsensical.

Further, the authors specifically write that they only looked at acute effects and did not analyze “chronic toxicity,” and cannot judge marijuana and “long term effects.” Indeed, they specifically write in their study the toxicity of marijuana “may therefore be underestimated” given the limitations of their examination. Yet, legalizers ignore these statements. Always. It simply does not fit their narrative.

What long-term effects are we talking about? To cite the New England Journal of Medicine: “addiction, altered brain development, poor educational outcomes, cognitive impairment,” and “increased risk of chronic psychosis disorders.” Now think about what it will mean to make a drug with those adverse effects more available, and for recreational use.

Finally, the very authors of the much-cited Journal of Scientific Reports study specifically warn their research should be “treated carefully particularly in regard to dissemination to lay people….especially considering the differences of risks between individuals and the whole population.” But this is precisely what commercialization is about—not individual adult use but making a dangerous drug more available to “the whole population.”

Given what we know in states like Colorado, we clearly see that legalization creates more availability which translates into more use, affecting whole populations—Colorado college-age use, for example, is now 62 percent higher than the national average. [See FN2, below].

And the science is coming in, regularly. Indeed, the same journal the MPP points to in its two-year old “novel” study, just this year published another study and found:

“[N]eurocognitive function of daily or near daily cannabis users can be substantially impaired from repeated cannabis use, during and beyond the initial phase of intoxication. As a consequence, frequent cannabis use and intoxication can be expected to interfere with neurocognitive performance in many daily environments such as school, work or traffic.

That is why these comparisons of safety and harm are—in the end—absurd and dangerous. In asking what is safer, the true answer is “neither.” And for a variety of reasons. But where one option is impossible to eliminate (as in alcohol), society should not add to the threat that exists: One doesn’t say because a playground is near train tracks you should also put a highway there. You fence off the playground.

That, however, is not the choice the MPP has given us. They are not sponsoring legislation to reduce the harms of alcohol, they are, instead, saying that with all the harms of alcohol, we should now add marijuana. But looking at all the problems society now has with substance abuse, the task of the serious is to reduce the problems with what already exists, not advance additional dangers.

If the MPP and its Campaigns to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol are serious about working on substance abuse problems, we invite them to join those of us who have labored in these fields for years. One thing we do know: adding to the problems with faulty arguments, sloppy reasoning, and questionable science, will not reduce the problems they point to. It will increase them. And that, beyond faulty argument and sloppy reasoning, is public policy malfeasance.

“I am very thankful for the opportunity to have shared my conservative outsider message with the citizens of CD-5. Although we came up short on results, I believe we were successful in making this election about the issues rather than political hand-offs. Voters want to know their representatives are not taking them for granted.

“I want to thank my supporters, volunteers and staff for devoting their time, talent and treasure to this campaign. They carried the weight of this endeavor and to them, I am indebted.

“I congratulate my opponent, Senator Andy Biggs, and wish him the best in the General Election.

“The General Election is rapidly approaching and there is much work to be done to elect Republicans in local, state and national elections. We must not take anything for granted, especially the trust of the voters. This election will be critical to restoring the economy, jobs and national security to America. We must win.

“As for me and my family, I will continue to contribute to the community making the East Valley a great place to work, play and raise a family.”

Watch Ernie White Media interview IC Arizona editor Rachel Alexander, former prosecutor Lisa Aubuchon, and federal attorney Jeffrey Moffatt on how they were targeted as conservative attorneys by the State Bar of Arizona and others connected to the Bar, including the Bar’s crooked disciplinary judge William O’Neil. This kind of corruption isn’t just happening at the Department of Justice, but on the local level. Alexander and Aubuchon were both briefly attorneys for Sheriff Arpaio, which is why they were targeted. They join a growing number of attorneys who have had their reputations, career, health and lives destroyed by these crooked, vicious partisans, and so they and Moffatt will not stop speaking out until the corruption is rooted out. Alexander and Aubuchon are now in their seventh year of the never-ending targeting, which Alexander has written about here.

There is no exit polling but the chatter is that Lando lost because he noticeably increased spending soon after taking office. His actions seemed to cost the county money from day one, including summarily firing a merit protected employee in what was called The Pinal County Massacre and choosing a chief deputy mired in controversy.

Voyles rarely showed up to candidate forums and Volkmer took full advantage of that fact to list the mistakes and shortcomings of Voyles. Volkmer did not hold back and his charges against Voyles went unanswered by the absent Voyles.

An even greater election night beat-down took place in the race to replace outgoing Sheriff Paul Babeu. His hand-picked successor, Chief Deputy Sheriff Steve Henry, was resoundingly defeated by another political newcomer Mark Lamb.

Voyles and Henry continued using the Law and Order moniker that Babeu and Voyles rolled out in 2012 but the tag line was of little help this year. Henry was not an incumbent in the race but as the current chief deputy, he came pretty close.

Not only was the defeat of an incumbent and an anointed successor a surprise but the margin of victory for the two challengers was a surprise. Few people know how the two new elected officials will run their offices but clearly the voters chose a change in direction for law enforcement in Pinal County.

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